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Yesterday I did a session for Idera’s Geek Sync series called “Visual Design Tips for Power BI & SSRS 2016+”. In the session, I called out a bunch of resources that I had used to build me session. Here are the things I talked about and the and where to… Read more

It’s been a while since I’ve done a SQL Saturday and I’m happy to be joining the folks in Orlando again this year. I spoke there a couple years ago and had a great time so I’m sure this will not disappoint.
If you happen to be headed to the… Read more

Please visit SQLShack.com for new articles on many facets of SQL Server. I have been trying my best to document how to create SQL Server Analysis Service databases with Multidimensional Cubes as well as Tabular Models.

The start was a Best Practices article for Dimensional Modeling and other items that… Read more

There is a lot of information within the Windows registry. Sometimes, it would sure be nice to work with the registry within your T-SQL scripts. As it turns out, there are a bunch of undocumented extended stored procedures that do just this. A listing of these procedures are:

It’s Wednesday and that means another SQL/Oracle post. Today we’ll be discussing NULL Values, which can sometimes be a real pain. Don’t worry though there’s a simple solution. Simply replace the NULL value with another.

Comparing a column with NULL and replacing with another value is really simple. There are… Read more

Last week I presented my session on SQL Server & Containers for the PASS Virtualization Group and during my prep I noticed that there’s some functionality available to Windows containers and not Linux containers.

One of the (if not the) main benefits of working with SQL in a container… Read more

This post demonstrates one of the ways to gather an inventory of database backup information. The output of the script includes various columns that show the internals of a database, backup size, and gives the latest completion statuses and the corresponding backup sizes. Though the output is derived from the… Read more

I mentioned in my previous post about manually updating statistics that you can specify whether they’re updated using a full scan, or you can specify an amount of data to sample, either a percentage of the table size, or a fixed number of rows. You can also choose not to… Read more

Lots of people are confused by how to deal with bad parameter sniffing when it occurs. In an effort to help with this, I’m going to try to make a decision flow chart to walk you through the process. This is a rough, quite rough, first draft.

I recently wrote a post about using Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) with Azure Key Vault as an alternative to managing certificates. Today’s post will explore using SQL Server’s Always Encrypted functionality with Azure Key Vault. Always Encrypted, as with TDE, can use Windows certificates or what an external storage location… Read more

We were deploying a new web service. Because of the nature of the service, we wanted it to listen on a non-standard port. Security by obscurity doesn’t work against a real attacker or well-written malware. However, if someone was just attempting to check for a web server by doing the… Read more

I’m working on a project right now and it’s going to require me not only to refresh my SSIS skills a bit but learn a few things that are only available with the latest tools. So everyone ready for a few SSIS posts? Good. Me too!

I recently got a new laptop with Windows 10. I noticed SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS 17.1) was looking a bit blurry on my laptop screen. On another screen, it looked fine though. The cause for this is easy to find in the display settings. My primary screen is scaled… Read more

So the decision to move to the cloud has been made but there is a fear from people that once it happens they will lose control of their job function. Does this sound familiar? DBA’s, you will be needed but expect some sort of change (That’s my opinion).